


Countdown

by Cirro



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 03:08:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3472199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cirro/pseuds/Cirro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You fall asleep with tobacco and salt on your lips, another fervent promise clenched between your teeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Countdown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kumiko_sama_chan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kumiko_sama_chan/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Sanji :)

10\. Death

You are ten years old when you first feel your resolve crack. Your dream suddenly crumbles like ash in your mouth, and you can only swallow it down bitterly, salt burning down your throat because you can’t keep the tears from spilling over. The earth swallows up your tears easily, and you feel irrationally jealous of the dirt beneath your cracked fingernails. Your stomach is filled with desperation, and you feel like you have lost something even as your heart weighs heavily in your ribcage. The sun sets for the seventy-second time, and your desperation boils over into a burning fear because you don’t want to die, you don’t want to die, _you don’t want to die_. The handle of the knife digs into your palm, slick with that burning fear and something dangerously close to hope.

You are ten years old when you realize you are a fool, and you should have never dreamt in the first place.

 

9\. Hope

You don’t hope for more than what you already have. Nine months after you receive salvation in the form of a ship, you finally manage to convince Zeff that you can handle the nightmares.

The mattress digs painfully into your spine because it is too soft and you can’t quite believe that it is real. It’s like a dream come true. A lump forms in your throat at the thought, and you can barely swallow down the sobs that threaten to shake apart the fragile, dull reality you have constructed around yourself like a shield. You tell yourself that this is enough, that this will always be enough. Holding your breath, you wait for the burn in your chest to leave, ignoring the mantra of maybes and what ifs and the litany of dreadful hope that makes you _want_.

It never does.

You spend the next nine years of your life trying to tear out the remains of your conviction, and you tell yourself that you don’t care.

 

8\. Composition

Eight weeks after the nightmares end, you steal a passing customer’s last cigarette as petty revenge for a slight easily forgotten. It’s harder to light than you thought, and when you finally manage to make it burn, the acrid smoke smells familiar even though it makes your nose crinkle with distaste. The smoke tastes like ash and salt and something bitter that burns through your lungs, but somehow it makes it easier to breathe. With every inhale you can almost forget the weight of your forgotten dreams.

You go through eight more packs within the next month, and you convince yourself that the shaking in your fingers is from the nicotine and nothing else.

 

7\. Memory

There is a book with a thick spine emblazoned with golden text tucked into the forgotten corner of the uppermost shelf. You manage to retrieve it safely, blowing off the layer of dust that makes your nose itch. You flip it open, absently wiping your fingers clean from the cover’s grime. Seven pages in and you cannot stop reading.

When you get to chapter seven, you learn about the legend for the first time. The contents: a lost sailor, a lonely mermaid, and an ancient map with a faded x mark. You feel as if you have gone on the adventure with them. You read about a hundred and one types of fish, limited only by your childish imagination, and you can almost feel the sunlight flashing across the countless scales under the waves. You want to learn more.

The library across town is small, but the long trek through thick banks of snow is worth it. In faded text and curled paper, you learn more than you ever thought possible. You read about golden nautilus shells, of crabs with blue carapaces and green speckles. You read about creatures in the depths of the abyssal plains, all glowing lights and a smile filled with sharp teeth. You read about delicate pink jellyfish shaped like bulbs, and turtles seven times your size. You trace the outline of a two-tailed whale with a reverence you have never had before, marveling at the elegant curve of their fins. Pressing a kiss to the sheet of paper, you make the promise of a lifetime.

Seven words: “I’m going to find the All Blue.”

 

6\. Return

Six years after your tenth birthday, you finally stop talking about your promise, replacing it with another. You wear form fitted suits and smoke six cigarettes a day, creating an image of a man too busy to deal with frivolous things such as dreams. Zeff sometimes looks at you with an unreadable expression, lips pressed into a thin line and downturned at the corners. You ignore it as you ignore everything else, and if Zeff is stricter on those days, neither of you speak about it.

And if the following years feel heavy and bitter like the smoke in your lungs, you carry on as if there’s nothing wrong. You gulp down cigarette smoke like water until your throat hurts, and even then you cannot let yourself stop. Zeff confiscates your cigarettes when you wake up one morning and cannot speak. In the next six days all you want to do is claw out the itch that has accumulated under your collarbone, but instead you reach into your left breast pocket and take out your last cigarette. There is a moment where all you do is stare at it, and then you throw it overboard.

You think yourself foolish, but maybe there is something left of you, after all. 

Six months after the beginning of the year you turn nineteen, they arrive. They are what you used to be, and they are not ashamed as you are. You find yourself listening instead of ignoring them. They are confidence personified, they are bravery and sacrifice and foolishness except they aren’t. They are everything you wanted to be, and everything you were, are.

It takes six seconds to let hope come crashing back in waves of uncontrollable want.

You don’t understand. You don’t understand why they fight, why they try so hard, why they can’t just pretend to forget. Blood fills your mouth, and you think it tastes bittersweet. Except Zeff looks at you with regret, and you feel like you have lost something once again. So you try harder and you feel something _crack_ , and all you can think of is Zeff and selfishness and the taste of redemption. You think of Zeff and what you have taken. It doesn’t occur to you that he has given them up for you.

It takes six words for you to realize: “He didn’t save you for this.”

And then you start to understand.

After you spit out mouthfuls of blood and ash and salt, you light a cigarette and it tastes neither bitter nor sweet. You barely notice the smoke that curls in the air around you because you are too intent on staring at the waves. You are jarred out of your thoughts by an exclamation that is so ridiculous you almost want to laugh. The boy sitting on your bed is tenacious and unyielding, with a dream too big for people to understand. He is just like you, but completely different at the same time.

Staring at this boy who has no room for doubt, who believes in dreams without hesitation, you feel like anything could be possible. You let the words roll off your tongue as easily as they did when you first made your promise: “do you know about the All Blue?”

Six hours later and your throat is aching with a faith you almost let yourself forget. It feels good. You almost don’t realize that you’re smiling.    

 

5\. Start

Five companions, all with dreams too large to comprehend. You match their resolve, shoving away any doubts you ever had.

Five declarations in the midst of a storm and a barrel shattered with the force of your combined conviction. In the sleet of stinging rain, you grin widely, whooping out into the storm because you are almost overwhelmed with the realization that _this is real_.

You feel unstoppable, filled with an unshakeable faith and the renewed promise of a lifetime.

 

4\. Calm

Four months after you leave home, you make it halfway around the world.

You fight and bleed and laugh through it all because you have never felt so alive. You may have broken four ribs, but you stand up straight with a stiff confidence made from resolution and a promise you will never let yourself forget again.

You write four letters throughout the months, all addressed to Zeff though you never send them. You tell him about myths that are not myths, about the sea and falling in love and impossible dreams, and you always end up with an ink soaked sheet of paper from all the scratched out words you are too embarrassed to relay. The letters are burned, and you smoke four more cigarettes than usual, snapping at anyone in your way as you storm out of the galley.

You may be a hopeless romantic, but there are _limits_. Usopp gives you a look that you expertly ignore.

A few seconds pass and then he is yelling at you and Zoro to “stop trying to destroy everything, you jerks!” Four casualties later and you have forgotten the letter and its burned sentimentality you are too stubborn to admit is real. Nami towers over you and your fallen comrades with a clenched fist, and you give her a grin that may be a bit cheeky and much too adoring. She sighs loudly and smacks you on the back of the head. You give her a wider grin.

Four months and four more companions, and you are the happiest you have been since you were ten years old and remembered the taste of food.

 

3\. Addition

Everything falls apart.

Three days are made into two years.

You feel lost and useless, and the familiar taste of desperation coats your tongue like bile, but you let it fuel your anger, your determination, and you spend your time waiting and fighting and making yourself a monster.

Three months after your separation, you are lying on a beach, listening to the waves crash along the shoreline in time with your breathing. Your lips are dry. When you bite them, all you can taste is salt and the remnants of the cigarette you lost while training. Your muscles are sore, and you don’t think you’re going to be moving any time soon. So you lay there underneath the dark sky, listening to the rhythmic waves pulling at your feet every three heartbeats. The stars illuminate the ocean, casting pinpricks of light across the water, and you wonder if the others share what you see. With a startling clarity that shouldn’t be as surprising as it is, you realize your dream is now shared between nine other people, and you know that it will never be complete without them.

You light your third cigarette of the day, and the smoke feels warm.

You fall asleep with tobacco and salt on your lips, another fervent promise clenched between your teeth.

 

2\. Treasure

Your dream is a prayer made up of two syllables. They are pressed against your lips in reverence and faith and with a childish, dreaded hope that you can’t help but clutch with unyielding, smoke-stained fingers.

This is how you imagine it:

white capped waves lined with salt, clear blue waters and gentle ripples and maybe a coral reef offshore. there would be pebble-sized cuttlefish, eels made of clay, and maybe even giant starfish basking under the waves. it would be warm and the water made of sunlight, and you would be able to teach chopper how to dive for shells.

you imagine it in the deep ocean where light cannot reach, and in the darkness you would find monsters pulsing softly with dim lights, scaleless and sightless and with beautiful sweeping fins made like sheets of ice. there would be infinite schools of silver fish with transparent skin and glass skeletons, slipping through your fingers like water. and in the deepest part of the trenches, there would be gaping black caverns, home to sea beasts made from the core of the earth, flame and heat and molten rock under the weight of the oceans.

you imagine it as a current tracing the edges of the most dangerous stretch of water on the seas, cutting underneath the islands until it reached the other side of the world.

you think it would probably light up at twilight, the glow of its inhabitants mimicking the blinking stars in the night sky. whales would come out during the evening, and you’d get to see their tails obscure the moon before they disappeared beneath the waves.

or maybe it would be exactly the same as all the other blues except it would have two thousand types of fish and two thousand more you have never imagined.

You imagine it all and it’s never enough and, for the first time in your life, you don’t mind because it’s more than you have ever allowed yourself to hope for. You spend your days staring out at the horizon, filled with that familiar, dreaded, anticipated hope that makes you forget about cigarette smoke and starvation and loneliness.

You listen to the surf, the rhythmic push and pull of the tide, the waves lapping at the hull of the ship, and you close your eyes in reverence, in faith, with a prayer made of two syllables pressed against your lips.

Your cigarette remains unlit.

You dream.

 

1.

One year later, you find it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> kumiko-sama-chan's artwork can be found [here](http://kumiko-sama-chan.tumblr.com/post/112647990604/all-blue-sanji) :)
> 
> LET ME TELL YOU, THIS TOOK ME WAY TOO LONG TO WRITE and i'm not even remotely satisfied with it, but i really can't afford to care because I have final exams...............
> 
> EDIT: I ended up changing the second last section because i was highly dissatisfied with it. Hopefully it's better now!


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